Holistic review isn’t a tabulation of one’s achievements, leadership positions, or volunteer hours. It also isn’t a process that lines up applicants from one to 40,000 and draws an admissions line. Individual applicants are rarely, if ever, compared directly against one another. Although the perception of college admissions is that it’s a zero-sum game, the reality is a lot more complicated.

Even if they desired to—and they don’t—universities can’t tell you why a given student gained admission and another didn’t. Admissions reviewers have the impossible task of reading between the lines about the broader context and character of an applicant and whether their “fit” for major and campus culture is sincere or not.

They are making, at best, educated guesses and, at worst, are blinded by their own biases and errors in reasoning. Jeffrey Selingo observes, “Every year, top colleges turn away tens of thousands of students who could succeed on their campuses. It’s never clear who is the more qualified, the better fit, the truly deserving—or what any of that would really mean.”

Much of the suffering caused by college admissions comes after admissions decisions are released. Seniors scour “college results” forums like Reddit and College Confidential and YouTube videos to try and decipher why a given student gained admission at their perceived expense. An obvious folly of comparing yourself to an internet stranger is that you’re unlikely to have access to their essays, resume, or recommendation letters and rely instead on their nonsensical self-assessments.

The Chance Me subreddit is a community mostly of unqualified college students assessing the chances of worried high school juniors and seniors who self-report their credentials and college list. Reddit’s Chance Me and A2C is itself a highly distorted community. The average Redditor likely is in the top 1 percent of applicants worldwide, which gives the impression that every applicant posting their “stats” is phenomenal. That discourages merely excellent but not world-class students who come to the faulty conclusion that they’re below average.

Survivorship bias means that you only see the most talented admissions students or those who got incredibly lucky. MIT admitted a single applicant with an ACT between 25 and 27 among 236 applications. Success stories from applicants with academics substantially below average give mediocre students the impression that they have a chance. By definition, you will never see college results posts and videos from the 235 MIT applicants scoring 25 to 27 who did not gain admission. Only the survivors boast of their successes.

Chanceme can only be helpful when finding which universities are out of reach and maybe aren’t worth applying. Nobody can tell you with any reliability whether you will gain admission to a highly selective top 20 university or not. One reason I love independent consulting is that I can assess an applicant’s chances honestly. It frustrated me when I worked at UT-Austin when a family might talk to me for 20 minutes at a college fair, only for me to learn later that they ranked in the bottom 10 percent of their class. I wasn’t permitted to suggest that they shouldn’t waste their time because they don’t have a chance. It’s an admissions official’s job, after all, to accumulate applications and their fees. Admissions counselors at universities who practice holistic review can’t tell a student their chances are close to zero.